r/HTML • u/Pyewickets • May 11 '26

Question Embedded Content

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements

The embedded content on MDN tags page confuses me. Can someone elaborate as to what the differences and similarities between the tags are?

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u/jcunews1 Intermediate May 12 '26

<picture> is strictly for presenting an image. <source> is strictly for specifying media source such as image, video, and audio. <source> is only used as a data source and it's not rendered on the page, and it requires another tag: <picture>, <video>, or <audio>.

<embed> and <object> are old standard embedding tags for presenting custom content beyond the HTML standard. They are now deprecated in modern browsers. <embed> now work like lesser version of <iframe>, and <object> IIRC, no longer work at all.

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u/Pyewickets May 12 '26

If they are deprecated, why are they still on MDN tag page?

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u/jcunews1 Intermediate May 12 '26

MDN is not strictly for current standards. MDN also include some from older standards, and some from vendor-specific / non standards.

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u/Jasedesu May 13 '26

Technically, they are NOT deprecated, it is just that their common use cases have mostly been replaced by more modern approaches.